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In today’s Follow Up:

• GAP Selling things to know 🧠 

• Stop offending your prospects! 💡 

• Quitting sales to live in a Toyota Camry

• LinkedIn & a sales meme 😂 

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Everything Need to Know About GAP Selling

Today is all about the “GAP”.

Not the clothing brand. And not the space in between your friend’s front teeth. 🦷 

We’re talking about the GAP selling technique made famous by sales legend, Keenan.

Keenan has been in the sales game for well over 20 years and serves as the CEO of A Sales Growth Company (clever name), where he teaches teams how to sell with methods like Gap.

So as your sales bestie, we spent the time reading and researching the strategy so you don’t have to.

Here’s the most important things you should know…

What is The Gap?

The whole premise of this sales methodology is that “every sale starts with a problem”.

Every prospect is in their current state (where the problem is) and wants to get to their future state (where the problem is solved).

The only thing in between their current state and their future state is “the gap”.

The Current State

This isn’t about finding surface level problems like “We just want a tool that can automate this for us”.

This is all about uncovering the deep rooted issues like “We need a tool to do this for us because I was in the office until 10 PM last night doing this manually and missed my kid’s t-ball game”.

It’s your job as a sales rep to dig deep and uncover everything you can about the prospect’s problems. In some cases, this means finding problems they didn’t even know they had.

Doing deep discovery is the most important step in the gap selling process because it sets you up for the rest of the sale.

Use these 4 types of questions to uncover more about your prospect’s current state:

• Probing questions: Open-ended questions intended to get your prospect to give you more than just a yes or no.

  • “You mentioned this has been a big problem for the last 3 months. Can you tell me more about that?”

• Process questions: Uncover exactly how their process works in the current state.

  • “Could you walk me through how you’re doing this right now, step-by-step?”

• Provoking questions: Prompt your prospect to look at the issue from a different angle than they do right now.

  • “If you did {insert action}, what impact do you think it would have on your team?”

• Validating questions: Always confirm what the prospect is saying so you don’t make assumptions.

  • “It sounds like {insert issue} is causing a lot of tension in your team right now, do I have that correct?”

The Future State

This is where your prospect wants to be.

Things are working perfectly and all of their problems are solved.

There’s only one issue. People hate change, and it takes a lot of change to get from a current state to a future state.

So as sales reps, our job is to help the prospect understand what their future state would look like if they made the change (aka, buy our product).

You’ll need to clearly define what the prospect wants their future state to look like, and what impact it will have on their business.

This is also the time for you to evaluate how (and if) your product can take them from their current state to their ideal future state.

The Gap

People buy the gap.

The gap is the magic thing separating them from where they are today to where they want to be.

The bigger the gap = the bigger the opportunity to sell (and more $$$).

Your job as a sales rep is to help your prospects understand where those gaps are and how your products can bridge them.

TLDR:

• The current state is where your prospects are at today (problem area).

• The future state is where they want to be (problem solved).

• The gap is the “distance” between their current state and future state.

• If the gap is big enough, they’ll be willing to buy your solution to bridge it.

Checking in on LinkedIn ✍️ 

Yikes… 😬 

Sales Meme of the Day

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